Articulation rate: effects of age, fluency, and syntactic structure

(Reportamos los hallazgos básicos sobre los efectos del índice de articulación, derivados de la investigación experimental sobre la planificación de oraciones de los niños. Los experimentos fueron diseñados para evaluar los procesos de producción con atención a las variables sintácticas, a la vez que se controlaban las variables léxicas y fonológicas. Las mediciones del índice de articulación reflejaron que: (1) los índices difirieron entre niños (de 3 a 8,11) y adultos, donde los índices de los adultos fueron considerablemente más rápidos que los de los niños; (2) los efectos de la expresión de fluidez y falta de fluidez del sujeto sobre las subseries de fluidez difirieron para adultos y niños; y (3) el patrón del índice de articulación para las oraciones de relativo y las oraciones coordinadas difirió tanto de un tipo de oraciones a otro como dentro del grupo de edad (AU)

We report basic findings on articulation rate effects derived from experimental research on children's sentence planning. The experiments were designed to evaluate production processes with attention to syntactic variables while controlling for lexical and phonological variables. Articulatory rate measures showed (1) rates differed for children (3–8.11) and adults, with adult rates significantly faster than child rates; (2) the effects of fluent and dysfluent host utterances on fluent substrings differed for adults and children; (3) rate patterns for relative clause and conjoined clause utterances differed, both from each other and across age group (AU)

Children's sentence planning: syntactic correlates of fluency variations.

This paper argues for broader consideration of children's language production systems and, in that context, describes research on children's planning of syntactic structures. The research presented here measures non-fluency patterns in elicited utterances of varied syntactic type. We describe and interpret several regularities in these patterns for two groups of children ('young': three-five-year-olds; and 'older': six-eight-year-olds) and an adult comparison group. The evidence indicates a strong correspondence of adult and child responses to structural complexity, both in terms of global fluency measures and in terms of more detailed indicators of planning load. In addition, we report some specific contrasts in the patterning for children and adults that suggest disparities in processing resources and/or in local planning strategies.

Representing the meanings of object and action words: the featural and unitary semantic space hypothesis.

This paper presents the Featural and Unitary Semantic Space (FUSS) hypothesis of the meanings of object and action words. The hypothesis, implemented in a statistical model, is based on the following assumptions: First, it is assumed that the meanings of words are grounded in conceptual featural representations, some of which are organized according to modality. Second, it is assumed that conceptual featural representations are bound into lexico-semantic representations that provide an interface between conceptual knowledge and other linguistic information (syntax and phonology). Finally, the FUSS model employs the same principles and tools for objects and actions, modeling both domains in a single semantic space. We assess the plausibility of the model by showing that it can capture generalizations presented in the literature, in particular those related to category-related deficits, and show that it can predict semantic effects in behavioral experiments for object and action words better than other models such as Latent Semantic Analysis (Landauer & Dumais, 1997) and similarity metrics derived from Wordnet (Miller & Fellbaum, 1991).

Rapid adaptation to foreign-accented English.

This study explored the perceptual benefits of brief exposure to non-native speech. Native English listeners were exposed to English sentences produced by non-native speakers. Perceptual processing speed was tracked by measuring reaction times to visual probe words following each sentence. Three experiments using Spanish- and Chinese-accented speech indicate that processing speed is initially slower for accented speech than for native speech but that this deficit diminishes within one minute of exposure. Control conditions rule out explanations for the adaptation effect based on practice with the task and general strategies for dealing with difficult speech. Further results suggest that adaptation can occur within as few as two to four sentence-length utterances. The findings emphasize the flexibility of human speech processing and require models of spoken word recognition that can rapidly accommodate significant acoustic-phonetic deviations from native language speech patterns.

Exploring the activation of semantic and phonological codes during speech planning with event-related brain potentials.

We present a new technique for studying the activation of semantic and phonological codes in speech planning using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) that extend a well-established behavioral procedure from speech production research. It combines a delayed picture-naming task with a priming procedure. While participants prepared the production of a depicted object's name, they heard an auditory target word. If the prepared picture name and the target word were semantically or phonologically related, the ERP waveform to the target word tended less towards the negative when compared to an unrelated control. These effects were widely distributed. By contrast, if participants performed a nonlinguistic task on the depicted object (natural size judgment), the semantic effect was still obtained while the phonological effect disappeared. This suggests that the former effect indexes semantic activation involved in object processing while the latter effect indexes word-form activation specific to lexical processing. The data are discussed in the context of models of lexical access in speech production.